Page 141 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

recipients of media messages. However, this view has been continuously modified
over the years, first by the ‘uses and gratification’ approach that explored the
various uses that audiences had for the media and later, in the context of cultural
118 studies, by the active audience paradigm which emerged during the 1980s. In both
cases there is less stress on the power of the media to affect the audience and more
on the way in which the media are a resource for audience members in the
manufacture of meaning.

Links Active audience, circuit of culture, ideology, mass culture, polysemy, television, text

McRobbie,Angela (1951– ) A former postgraduate student at the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), Angela McRobbie is currently Professor
of Communications at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. Her early
research work on the relationship between teenage girls and magazines in the 1970s
involved textual analysis and a fairly straightforward model of how ideology is
absorbed by readers. She later produced sophisticated readings of magazines for
women and girls that put a greater stress on their active meaning-making and
consuming practices. In that sense her work has epitomized the broader trajectory
of cultural studies as it has moved from a central concern with ideology in the
tradition of Gramsci, to an engagement with consuming practices and
postmodernism. More recently she explored many other areas of contemporary
culture including fashion, modern art and pop music.
• Associated concepts Bricolage, consumption, gender, hegemony, ideology, youth
culture.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, feminism, post-feminism, post-Marxism,
postmodernism.
• Reading McRobbie, A. (1991) Feminism and Youth Culture. London: Macmillan.

Meaning The idea of meaning is an important one to cultural studies in so far as the
concept of culture is based on the notions of ‘maps of meaning’ and shared or
contested meaning. Indeed, cultural studies’ particular take on the concept of
culture has stressed the intersection of power and meaning. Thus key ideas such as
ideology, hegemony and discourse depend on some notion of meaning.
The problems begin with the idea of meaning when one asks the obvious
question, what does meaning mean? Or, to put it another way, where does meaning
reside? For some purposes a simple everyday language-use answer will be sufficient.
That is, meaning lies in the attitudes, beliefs, purposes, justifications and reasons
deployed by people in day-to-day life. Meaning indicates that something matters to
us; hence signification is to do with significance. As such, meaning guides our
actions or more often is a post hoc explanation and justification for them. However,
this style of answer may not satisfy a more philosophical form of inquiry since all
the crucial concepts being deployed in such an explanation – attitude, belief,
purpose, etc. – are subject to deconstruction by asking the question, what does
belief, attitude, purpose etc. mean?
The source of the problem lies in the implicit assumption that words derive